


Catalogue of Bruises

by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)



Category: Pawns and Symbols - Majliss Larson, Star Trek - Various Authors
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-17
Updated: 2012-02-17
Packaged: 2017-10-31 08:08:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/341850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/pseuds/Sandrine%20Shaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their relationship is a catalogue of bruises and wounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catalogue of Bruises

Tirax never got to see the bruises he'd inflicted on Czerny during their first encounter, but he's certain that they were no match for the scar on his shoulder he carried home from the fight, the one where her dagger almost killed him. It has faded since then, in the months and years to follow, and now all that's left is a thin white line. 

As battle marks go, it's a minor one. Sometimes, though, there's an itch underneath the scar tissue that he cannot scratch away. 

Her fingers sometimes linger on the spot, in what could be appreciation of her work or maybe apology. He never bothers to ask; but in those nights, he takes her more roughly than he usually does, and his fingers leave prints on that delicate human skin of hers that turn blue in the morning.

Their relationship is a catalogue of bruises and wounds: from the cuts the earthquake on Sherman's Planet had covered her skin with back when he first laid eyes on her, to the scratch marks on his back her fingernails left last night. 

It always seems to end with scars and bruises, whether they fight or make love – and sometimes it's not easy to tell those two apart. That's how they got here, a confrontation that started as a fight but turned into something else instead: angry words, cutting insults, her slap leaving a dark handprint on his cheek, his fingers crushing her wrist – _"If you ever dare to touch me again, human, you'll have to live with the consequences"_. When he said consequences, he meant broken bones and blood, not this, never this. But he should have known that she'd take it as a challenge just to spite him.

He had expected her to flinch away, not to reach out and brush the back of her hand against his cheek in a deliberate, foolish show of bravado, defiance in her eyes even though her voice wasn't quite steady – _"And what, pray tell, are you going to do to me?"_

To this day, he isn't sure if the gauntlet she'd carelessly thrown back then was just an empty taunt, knowing that he couldn't do any serious harm to her while she was still enjoying Kang's protection. Or whether it was deliberate, if she expected him to recapture her wrist and push her against the wall, claiming her lips in an angry, rough kiss that he'd never even realized he'd wanted before.

He doesn't know when that happened: when the desire to possess her had become stronger than the desire to break her, when frustration over her fierce defiance had turned into grudging admiration, when he'd stopped hurting her to inflict pain and started hurting her because watching her push through was a beautiful sight.

After she'd been captured and tortured by the ISG, Tirax had told his brother, "It's a pity I wasn't around for the main event." He remembers the curious look Kahlex had given him, and the amused way he'd said, "It's probably a good thing. I think you would have enjoyed it too much, for all the wrong reasons."

It took him almost two years to figure out what Kahlex had meant then. Two years and a multitude of confrontations and clashes with Czerny, despite Kang's warning for him to stay away from the human if he valued his life. He heeded the advice as well as he could, or at least enough to stay alive. Still, there were more bruises to account for: the one where he was merely doing his job to protect her on planet-side and received a cut across the forearm from an angry villager, the one where a virus outbreak on the ship stripped them all of their inhibitions and her dagger barely missed his eye (she got a matching cut on her right hip from the occasion), the broken wrist where an argument got out of hand and both of them lost balance on a narrow mountain path. Countless bruises that faded until they were nothing but faint echoes of the tension building between them.

He never apologized for anything he did to her, and neither did she – not in so many words, anyway. 

Even now, he likes to think nothing has changed between them, that the sex is just another outlet for their mutual antipathy, just a safe way for him to leave her with bruises that Kang won't have him killed for. But he's not that good at denial, and he knows that there's nothing safe about what they're doing. He's all too aware of the fact that the worst scars they inflict on each other nowadays, the ones that last the longest, are not the visible ones.

Ever since he first kissed her, he has barely even looked at other women. And despite how much they cling to the barely restrained violence of their sexual encounters, there are unguarded moments when his kisses grow almost tender, when her embrace turns soft instead of bruising, when the curiosity about how far he can bend her until she breaks is replaced by the urge to protect her, when he feels her shaping words against his skin that he knows she wouldn't dare to speak.

The irony, of course, is that she's handing him a weapon far more destructive than any dagger, enough to crush her and tear her apart. It goes both ways, though, and for once he finds himself unwilling to pay the price and bear the scars. 

End.


End file.
